“It had been remarked that while the agitating news of those Parisian Three Days flew from mouth to month, and dinned every ear in Weissnichtwo, Herr Teufelsdrockh was not known, at the Gans or elsewhere, to have spoken, for a whole week, any syllable except once these three:  Es geht an (It is beginning).  Shortly after, as Ew.  Wohlgeboren knows, was the public tranquillity here, as in Berlin, threatened by a Sedition of the Tailors.  Nor did there want Evil-wishers, or perhaps mere desperate Alarmists, who asserted that the closing Chapter of the Clothes-Volume was to blame.  In this appalling crisis, the serenity of our Philosopher was indescribable:  nay, perhaps through one humble individual, something thereof might pass into the Rath (Council) itself, and so contribute to the country’s deliverance.  The Tailors are now entirely pacificated.—­

“To neither of these two incidents can I attribute our loss:  yet still comes there the shadow of a suspicion out of Paris and its Politics.  For example, when the Saint-Simonian Society transmitted its Propositions hither, and the whole Gans was one vast cackle of laughter, lamentation and astonishment, our Sage sat mute; and at the end of the third evening said merely:  ’Here also are men who have discovered, not without amazement, that Man is still Man; of which high, long-forgotten Truth you already see them make a false application.’  Since then, as has been ascertained by examination of the Post-Director, there passed at least one Letter with its Answer between the Messieurs Bazard-Enfantin and our Professor himself; of what tenor can now only be conjectured.  On the fifth night following, he was seen for the last time!

“Has this invaluable man, so obnoxious to most of the hostile Sects that convulse our Era, been spirited away by certain of their emissaries; or did he go forth voluntarily to their head-quarters to confer with them, and confront them?  Reason we have, at least of a negative sort, to believe the Lost still living; our widowed heart also whispers that ere long he will himself give a sign.  Otherwise, indeed, his archives must, one day, be opened by Authority; where much, perhaps the Palingenesie itself, is thought to be reposited.”

Thus far the Hofrath; who vanishes, as is his wont, too like an Ignis Fatuus, leaving the dark still darker.

So that Teufelsdrockh’s public History were not done, then, or reduced to an even, unromantic tenor; nay, perhaps the better part thereof were only beginning?  We stand in a region of conjectures, where substance has melted into shadow, and one cannot be distinguished from the other.  May Time, which solves or suppresses all problems, throw glad light on this also!  Our own private conjecture, now amounting almost to certainty, is that, safe-moored in some stillest obscurity, not to lie always still, Teufelsdrockh, is actually in London!